Garden update

Also, we’ve been harvesting a small bowl of strawberries every day, a nice addition to our breakfasts this past week. If you’ve ever wondered how many strawberry plants you’d need to feed a small family (but not have any leftover for preserving), here’s a good indication:

I think it’s around 15 plants? I didn’t actually count them. It’s a pretty small area, maybe 6 feet by 2 feet, curved. It’s big enough for me right now: my daily battle with rabbits includes spraying these with garlic/pepper spray. Every day. Having a small area like this makes it a bit more manageable.

I pulled the remaining radishes and re-arranged the parsnips to spread them out — they were all in one big clump in the middle. Transplanting root vegetables is ill-advised, as they can develop forked roots as a result. This happened to me last year (but there were a couple of factors that could have caused the forked, stunted growth). I needed to spread these out or I would basically get none. We’ll see what happens.

My peppers are doing fine; they’ve really grown. They have more insect damage this year than in years past but I’m not sure what’s causing it. The two wee cauliflowers have taken off, too. The basil looks bad, but the sage at the back looks great! The flat-leafed parsley looks fine.

The cabbages have all grown quite a bit too. I will need to thin these out again.

Cuke cage: inside the cage, the plants are getting quite big. I have both radishes and cukes inside the cage, since radishes (supposedly) repel cucumber beetles. I also planted them all along the outside of the cage but slugs ate about half of them (the blue lid is a beer slug trap).

Finally, the peas and beans. Peas along the fence was a bad idea, in hindsight. The rabbits can easily nibble the tops of the peas right through the fence, and they have done so. They’ve taken probably half the peas. This mistake seems really obvious to me now, but for some reason it didn’t when I planted the seeds inside the fenceline. Lesson learned.

All this reminds me: time for my nightly spraydown of the yard with pepper/garlic spray.